I Recall, Central Park in Fall.

Today I feel as though part of me has died. A chapter is closed, and I know that I can’t be the only one feeling this way. Yesterday – while I was enjoying the celebration of my daughter’s 4th birthday – I got the news that we had lost John Hughes.

For someone whom I never had the privilege of meeting, John Hughes has been a massively important part of my life. He has been (and will continue to be) a father, a teacher, a composer, an author, an advocate and a voice for generations of kids navigating their way through the perilous adolescent landscape of self-discovery and self-expression. I think you either enjoy John’s films or you are completely obsessed with them; I unabashedly fall into the latter category. For me, they have always been instantly captivating, universally accessible, hilariously funny, heart-warming, heart-wrenching, and laden with enough memorable one-liners to burst the seams of the North American pop-culture vernacular.

He has taught us so much.

John’s films made it okay to be different, and they made it okay to feel trapped and conflicted by the pressure to conform and the desire to belong. In his stories, there was always a way out and one’s friends were the essential army of support that they should be… if you were lucky enough to be surrounded by good ones. It was alright to feel shame and disappointment. It wasn’t unique to be secretly in love with with your best friend (Watts, I see you), and it wasn’t implausible – or creepy – that you might act out your anguish by riding your bike past her house a dozen times a day (Ducky, I see you too). It was normal to feel like an outcast, and John singled out those of us who did and showed us that transcendence comes from accepting yourself NOT allowing yourself to be defined by whether or not those around you accept you. It was okay to cheer out loud when you triumphed and it was expected that you would cheer out loud for your friends when they did. It was also okay to cry, and to let everyone see when you did.

When I think of the people in my life that impacted me most as a teenager, they were almost always the ones who could temper a serious topic with humour: John was a master of that. He found a way to get a message of acceptance through to young people in a way that was totally sincere, devoid of corniness and that would ultimately lead to laughter and understanding. One of the best examples of his skill in managing both drama and humour occurs during the “Group Therapy” scene in The Breakfast Club. Almost three minutes of sustained, single-shot, slow pan camera work captures Andy (Emilio Estevez) revealing the nature of his relationship with a unrelenting and abusive father unwilling to accept anything less than perfection, and whose blind obsession with his son’s success overshadows any real care or concern for his happiness. The scene then culminates with Bender (Judd Nelson) delivering one of his many classic one-liners throughout the film: “I think your old man and my old man (ed. who’s physically abusive) should get together and go bowling”. I can say without a shred of sarcasm that it is one of the most artfully shot scenes I have ever had the privilege of seeing on film. Hughes covers a lot of ground during the scene, including sex, abuse, peer-pressure, parental pressure and even suicide, and yet somehow the characters are all laughing in the end – happier for having discovered that the things that unite them greatly outnumber those that polarize them from each other within the social fabric of their school. It is brilliant story-telling.

And then there is the music…

Much like a film has a soundtrack, so do our lives. Songs mark moments and delineate the passage of time. They earmark memories allowing nostalgia to blossom and flourish while injecting greater meaning into already visceral experiences. John’s films are like that, but for a music-lover coming of age in the 80’s, they were also an essential source of the music that would leave the theater with us and make its way onto our many beloved mix-tapes. They would mark parts of the film in our memory, but they would also extend beyond the screen to become part of the playlist of our own lives.

My two go-to sources for music at the time were my older brother’s record collection and John Hughes’ films. He was a renegade and an early adopter of bands that  were not even getting recognition on MTV at the time; who else was scoring films with music by The Rave-Ups, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Flesh For Lulu, The Divinyls and Altered Images? He is as much responsible for introducing me to the bands that would dominate my stereo (and still do!) as any other single person or source. New Order, The Psychedelic Furs, OMD, Thompson Twins, General Public, Nik Kershaw, The Specials, etc. His way of setting scenes to music is a huge part of why his films work. While there were certainly hits on the soundtrack, he never shied away from scoring his films with lesser known songs by emerging groups. New Order’s Shellshock and Thieves Like Us provided remarkable impact in Pretty in Pink, but his use of the band’s instrumental epic Elegia was a masterstroke. The Smiths’ Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want was a perfect metaphor for Ducky’s unrequited love for Andie, but it was equally well-suited (albeit craftily re-arranged) for the Art Institute of Chicago scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. His occasional nods to past classics introduced a whole new generation to their parents’ and grandparents’ music, resulting in 14 year-olds all over the country lip-synching to Otis Redding and singing Wayne Newton’s Danke Schoen in the shower. Music was such an essential part of his films that he even created a teaser trailer for Some Kind of Wonderful that featured an anonymous drummer (later revealed to be Watts in the actual film) playing a brief solo before the screen faded to black revealing the title and release date. No characters or plot details were even introduced and it didn’t matter; the music sold it.

Most significantly, John Hughes was an adult who “got it” when it came to young people. He was like the cool teacher you could talk too, or the guidance counsellor who actually knew how to do their job. He was our confidant and we – an entire generation of young people – were his muse. During the closing minutes of The Breakfast Club, Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) reads from his essay written in detention that day. He writes to Principal Vernon “You see us as you want to see us; in the simplest terms, the most convenient definitions”. John Hughes saw us for who we really were, and this morning legions of brains, jocks, prom queens, basket-cases and delinquents alike look back with profound admiration and gratitude on a career that was devoted – in such large part – to telling our story.

Thank you John. You will be missed.